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Marisa Parham

the feed that hands you

Monday, October 20, 2014.

It is almost 10 a.m. and I have turned to Facebook because all this talk of the digital dead is making me tired and I am seeking company and relief and cute animal pictures, perhaps some intelligent discourse on the otter, to get me thinking again.
I catch some lovely hellos.

Hello!

And then I am fed a Scandal meme.

LOL. I totally would have thought the same thing. This feed is delicious. That’s totally what I felt when I saw that scene.

I am #winning on the feeding, until I catch “a map of lynchings.” Great. A data visualization. Now I am overwhelmed with losing.

I return here to my essay about this non-thing that has just happened to me, to take a moment to add it to my own stream. I go back to my feed to grab the image. It is already gone. I go looking for it and, after finding a different map, I can figure where the first one came from. More clicking.

Why am I doing this right now? I cannot tell you. I see that my Facebook feed has switched itself back from “most recent stories” to “top stories.” With or without me– I cannot remember why I am here.

In the café where I am sitting, my approximately twenty third favorite song of all time has come on. It’s a song that draws an analogy between the distance between oneself and a love interest and the difficulty one would have communicating with someone under the sea, communicating in a different medium.